u/rob2688

Hopefully i never spill

Corrugated polycarbonate clear roof panel from Home Depot. 8’ x about 2’ for ~ $30 from Home Depot. Cut with utility knife. Tank is a month old. Going away for the long weekend so wanted to help reduce evaporation. Tank is a 40g rimmed breeder

Just saw this today. White fuzzy looking patches. Have had these guys for almost two weeks. One passed a few days ago, it had darker colorations like this one as compared to the others.

New to the hobby, have not had to fight fungus, ich, or other abnormalities before. No hospital tank. Don’t know the right thing to do!

40g rimmed breeder
Oase Biomaster 2 Thermo 250
In-line CO2
Seaoura 42w light
Organic soil capped with pea gravel and sand

12 Rummynose tetra
9 Julii Cory
6 Amano shrimp
1 mystery snail
?? Ramshorn, bladder, pond, MTS

Been obsessed with researching planted tanks for months, and now that I’m about a month in, I finally understand a bunch of the random stuff people talked about on reddit that sounded fake or exaggerated at first lol.

Green hydra are real and suddenly just… appear
Seed shrimp zooming around the sand like microscopic roombas
“Just a couple hitchhiker snails” on my red root floaters turned into what feels like a full civilization of bladder and ramshorn snails
Java fern growing entire baby plants with roots directly off the leaves like some alien cloning experiment
My red tiger lotus went from tiny leaves to absolute dinner plates
Fish completely changing personality during feeding time
How much water actually evaporates from a tank
The crazy amount of tannins driftwood releases at first
The first time anaerobic bubbles came up from the substrate scared the hell out of me — my filter started making a trickling noise at the same time and I genuinely thought my tank was leaking somewhere
Filling my tank up the first took wayyyy longer than expected… ~45 gallons is alot of water

Honestly one of the coolest parts has been realizing the tank feels more like a little ecosystem than just a glass box with fish in it.
Still learning constantly, but I finally get why people get addicted to this hobby.
What were the weirdest/funniest things you discovered in your first planted tank?

Setup:
Rimmed 40g breeder from petco
Oase Biomaster 2 Thermo 250
Green leaf aquarium in line diffuser and regulator w/ 5lb CO2 tank from chain welding & gas shop
Seaoura 42w light from Amazon
Organic soil capped w/ pea gravel and sand
12 rummynose tetra, 9 Julii Cory (one passed), 1 blue mystery snail, got 12 Malaysian trumpet snails last week, and hundreds of bladder/ramshorn

Started cycle with API QuickStart, then read stuff saying theirs didn’t work, and got Brightwell Aquatics MicroBacter Start XLF. 21 days in tank was cycled and got 6 Julii Cory cats first.

Looking forward to getting some Amano shrimp tomorrow. Khuli loaches in the future to. This has been a great new hobby and i love scrolling the Reddit posts for planted tanks and aquariums!

Planted tank, this dude scurries around the sand. Not sure what it be

Any algae i should be looking out for that’s really bad for new aquarium while cycling? I have couple of plants with some algae looking stuff